Phil Mickelson’s target was a circle 4 1/4 inches in diameter and 73 yards from where he stood. It sat in a swale of a gently sloping and slightly elevated green, on the opposite side of the pond known as Bruce Devlin’s Billabong.

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Mickelson declined to calculate the odds of a closing eagle from the fairway after falling one shot short at the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines, but when he sent his caddie ahead to tend the flagstick, the spectators responded as if Babe Ruth had just pointed toward the bleachers.

The percentages, of course, were preposterous. Mickelson was aiming at a hole a little wider than a brick at a distance a little longer than a hockey rink. But since this was Lefty’s last chance to lasso Bubba Watson for a sudden-death playoff, preposterous had become the order of the day.

Jim “Bones” Mackay, Mickelson’s caddie, pulled the flag from its base and a spectator rumble became a roar. This was not the sort of thing you see every day on the PGA Tour or, indeed, every year — a flag being tended for a player in the fairway — and yet it was exactly what you’d expect from golf’s most audacious shot-maker.

“If he makes it, I’m getting ready for a playoff,” Bubba Watson said later. “So I’m trying not to get too emotional. I realize it’s Phil Mickelson. He can make any shot he wants to.”

Mackay grabbed the flag for a moment, but the bold symbolism of this gesture caused the noise to grow so loud that the caddie stepped back to signal for quiet. Then Mackay reached for the stick again, and waited while his boss let fly with his 64-degree wedge.

The PGA’s computers calculated that Mickelson’s ball came to rest exactly 50 inches from the cup — a little long and a little left — and Watson’s eyes became watery when word arrived over the radio that Mickelson had not, in fact, sank the shot.

The groan in the grandstand would have made you think Mickelson had missed a putt and not a prayer.

“I felt like it would have a chance,” Mickelson said. “About 10-12-14 times a year, I end up hitting the pin with a wedge, and it ricochets all over the place and I didn’t want that to happen. I also wanted to give it two chances.

“I wanted to fly it in, possibly, or I wanted it to skip past it, maybe bring it back (down the slope) and give it a second chance to go in and the pin would only get in the way of that. So I didn’t want to have the pin in if I was going to try to make it.”

If Torrey Pines’ South Course has evolved into a track that makes the bold choose to be boring — as Mickelson had complained on Saturday — it still produced terrific theater on Sunday. Despite lower temperatures, spasmodic rain and the rare irrelevance of Tiger Woods, this was a tournament that went down to the wire with rookie Jhonattan Vegas in contention, with Nick Watney scorching the South with a nine-under-par 63, with San Diego’s favorite Lefty chasing another appealing left-hander to the final hole, and with the winner describing himself as “goofy Bubba Watson from Bagdad, Fla.”

As Mickelson reviews his closing round, he is bound to find more frustration in the eagle putt that lipped out on No. 13 than on his fairway flyer at the finish, but he was quick to frame the event as a tournament Watson had won rather than one he had lost.

Watson had trailed Mickelson and Bill Haas by one stroke at the start of the day, but he made only one bogey en route to a five-under-par 67, and he made a series of pressure putts down the stretch to keep Mickelson at bay.

Curiously, Mickelson chose to hit his second shot on the par-5 No. 18 before Watson sank a 12-foot putt for his closing birdie. Some analysts argued that if Mickelson had waited (maybe less than a minute) and knew he needed an eagle to tie Watson, the appropriate move would have been a shot at the green rather than a lay up.

Mickelson maintained that his distance and his lie in the left rough allowed him little choice.

“I had 227 to carry,” he said. “If I hit a hybrid (club), the ball would have come out dead … so I couldn’t have made it over the water. But the way my 3-wood is, the ball would have come out hot and it would have went screaming over (the green).

“So I didn’t really have a shot to get it on the green. I felt like I had a better chance to make a three from the fairway trying to use that bank and bringing the ball back or flying it in.”

There was still abundant daylight when Mickelson wielded his wedge, but this was plainly a shot in the dark. And it didn’t miss by much.